What is it like to open two high-profile restaurants, in two different cities, in less than two weeks? For chef Jeremy Fox, it’s a crazy but surprisingly calming experience.
Fox, a versatile chef who followed up his “On Vegetables” cookbook with his “On Meat” cookbook, has worked in the top tier of fine dining in California and also created comforting, nostalgic food that celebrates Americana and the Jewish-American diaspora. In Los Angeles, he’s long been a leader of seasonal, market-driven cuisine. But recently, it was unclear whether he would cook in a restaurant again.
He closed Birdie G’s, a deeply personal restaurant named for his daughter and inspired by his grandmother’s home cooking, in Santa Monica at the end of 2025. The closure, one of many in L.A. spurred by an economic downturn, left Fox unmoored.
But now Birdie G’s is back, with an expanded repertoire, at a high-profile new location in Los Angeles. On October 26, Fox opened the new Birdie G’s inside the Fairmont Century Plaza hotel. Unlike the previous dinner-only Birdie G’s, the new restaurant serves breakfast, lunch and dinner.
“It’s a muscle I’ve never used before,” Fox told Observer on opening night after we ate his fried-oyster-topped riff on Caesar salad, soul-warming matzo ball soup, “pickle chick” schnitzel and Flannery steak frites before indulging in a slice of jiggly rose petal pie.
What added to the craziness is that Fox knew he would be in San Luis Obispo a few days later for friends-and-family service at The Restaurant at Edna. Fox and former Birdie G’s executive chef Matthew Schaler will open that vineyard restaurant, with a focus on local agriculture, on Thursday, November 5.
The timing of restaurant openings is always unpredictable, and the original goal was to open Birdie G’s and The Restaurant at Edna months apart.
“I will say that I planned to open both restaurants in the same week,” Fox joked this week when Observer asked him about his intense timeline. “That was the goal. I nailed it.”
But the reality is, he is now the opposite of unmoored, and it’s a good feeling.
“I’ve made no attempts to hide that I deal with anxiety,” Fox, who’s known for speaking freely about his mental health, tells Observer. “I spent much of this year pretty deep in anxiety because I didn’t have a place to go every day. I was used to having deadlines every day. I had to be ready for service every day. And my deadlines were all, like, eight months away. It was an anxiety of, like, ‘Am I achieving as much in my day as I should?’ … But as things ramped up in the last two-and-a-half months, I’ve actually been calmer. I’ve always been someone who, the more engaged I am, the more semi-overwhelmed I am, the calmer I am, and the more I’m able to block out the noise. As it’s gotten crazier, I’ve gotten calmer.”
It helps, of course, that he’s got an arsenal of dishes and techniques that he’s honed for decades. At Birdie G’s, he’s put a Rancho Gordo yellow eye bean stew on the lunch menu. That stew originated at Manresa, when David Kinch asked Fox to help create a patio menu. Fox then served the stew at Ubuntu and Rustic Canyon.
The stew “appears to have an ungodly amount of garlic,” Fox says. “The garlic has been cooked a certain amount, or else it disappears or overpowers the stew. It’s a matter of toasting the rosemary, the chili flakes and the garlic and olive oil, but not to the point where the garlic takes on any color. But it does have to be cooked through.”
Meanwhile, making Birdie G’s matzo ball soup, which is enriched with carrot miso, is a “regimented” process. Fox was influenced by both how his grandmother Gladys made matzo ball soup and how specific his wife, Rachael Sheridan, is about chicken broth when she makes matzo ball soup.
Birdie G’s is about Fox’s family and his desire to make everyday food. The Restaurant at Edna, with its focus on seasonal cooking and regional wines, is about using a different kind of muscle, one that Fox has called upon a lot in his career.
“It’s designed for the things I’m good at,” Fox says of the dinner-only, five-night-a-week restaurant. “There’s no concept to it. This is one of the ways I like to cook, where the menu changes constantly. It’s based on the buildability of the best local ingredients, prepared thoughtfully. Not fussy, though. The room begs itself to be a destination restaurant, but we really want to try to not fall into that. We want to be someplace where you can go every week, and there will be new things on the menu as well as things you remember that you had last time. And then dishes might be gone forever, or they might come back next year.”
During friends-and-family dinners, Fox and Schaler got raves for dishes like cone cabbage stuffed with smoked bacon, ramps and an egg-yolk sauce; sweet potato and pumpkin pavé with brown butter sabayon, sage and truffles; and mushroom ravioli shaped like mushrooms and featuring fonduta made with Stepladder Moonstone cheese.
There’s also the Edna salad, with a beet-based French dressing that Schaler impressed Fox with when he was applying to work at the original Birdie G’s. The Restaurant at Edna will serve local seafood like Petrale sole and California meat like Flannery beef. Fox is buying ingredients from nearby farms that previously supplied him in Los Angeles for more than a decade. He’s looking at shellfish from uni diver Stephanie Mutz. This is his wheelhouse.
But life, as Fox has long known, is about different things being true at the same time.
Fox and his family eat at Silver Lake’s Astro diner more than any other restaurant in Los Angeles. He very much wants Birdie G’s to be a comforting, unintimidating, everyday L.A. restaurant.
“The restaurants that originally inspired me to want to be part of the restaurant business were Applebee’s, Chili’s, The Cheesecake Factory, those kinds of places,” Fox says. “I went to culinary school and followed the path of fine dining when, originally, all I wanted to do was have a place that people like to go eat.”
Birdie G’s is that place now.
“It’s accessible food,” he says. “It’s recognizable. The original Birdie G’s was a crowd-pleaser. People who came really loved it and connected with it. A lot of people would say they haven’t had anything like that since their grandmother cooked it.”
But most grandmothers don’t do things like make a Caesar salad enhanced by “A.C.G.” powder with anchovies, capers and garlic that are cooked down in olive oil for a day and then strained and dehydrated.
Fox thinks a lot about the two dramatically contrasting restaurants in the movie “Big Night” and how he finds them both compelling.
“Birdie G’s, for me, was a way to kind of have one foot in both worlds, with the understated subtle cuisine and also the more over-the-top and accessible food while trying to be a little bit subversive,” he says.
The food at Birdie G’s is delicious and fun and a little crazy. For Fox, there’s comfort in the craziness.